I have also been thinking about the note that Woolf considered Spenser an early feminist. Not only does Spenser explicitly promote chastity and demonize female sexuality, he uses female adjectives to describe ill-willed creatures in the poem. In the first canto of Book I, Error is described as “Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide/ But th’ other halfe did womans shape retain,/ Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.” (1.1.14.124-126). Duessa, in the next canto, is “a cruell witch” and “a false sorceresse,/ That many errant knights hath brought to wretchedness” (1.2.33.289;34.305-6). These descriptions could be read as providing women with more agency than we have seen in other contemporary poetry. However, it seems that Spenser could be merely adding a third archetype to the ones allowed for women: virgin, whore, and monster.

Hi Kacie,

I agree with you that the depiction of women within the text appears to be questionable as being particularly feminist–or at least what we would think of today as being feminist. I think that the seeming contradiction you are getting at–that Spenser seems to both advocate for women’s leadership while also advocating for extreme chastity–makes sense when approaching the text as a glorification of Queen Elizabeth, as we discussed in class. In this context, promoting chastity as the supreme feminine virtue while also expressing the strength of exceptional women works when both concepts were part of the image Queen Elizabeth cultivated. One part of Book III that stood out to me along similar lines was in stanza 7 where the narrator comforts Guyon when Britomart  knocked him off his horse: “For not thy fault, but secret powre unseen,/That speare enchaunted was, which layd thee on the greene” (3.1.7.62-63). In the next stanza, the narrator tells Guyon that he would be embarrassed if he realized “that of a single damzell thou wert met” (3.1.8.67). Essentially, it is shameful if a man is overthrown by a woman, but in this case it appears to be somewhat okay because Britomart has an ‘enchaunted’ weapon. This type of thinking allows for the continuing of a general rule–women should not overthrow men–while also saying that in this instance, it’s alright because the reason is outside of anyone’s control. This seems to go along with a justification for a woman to reign as an exception to a general rule and is reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth’s speech where she refers to God’s decision to make her Queen, even though normally the kingdom would be entrusted to a man.

I also struggled (and continue to struggle) with not only interpreting, but following the poem. One way that I found it helpful to engage with the text is by utilizing our secondary source, the Hamilton article. For example, I found that Hamilton’s remarks that Virginia Woolf considered Spenser a feminist and that his first intended readership may have been female (4) to be an interesting lens through which to read parts of Book III. In particular, it appears that Spenser is catering to a female audience in the opening of the second Canto with his remarks that women were once powerful “till envious Men fearing their rules decay / Gan coyne streight laws to curb their liberty” (801). This line seems to almost critique patriarchy, yet in the previous Canto, Spenser spends a lot of time critiquing a woman for expressing sexuality, essentially curbing her liberty as much as the men in his poem. I am not sure how these moments are meant to relate to one another. Are they meant to be subversive in relation to one another? Or is this relationship hypocritical and / or paradoxical?

I am too finding this to be a difficult reading. On a literary level, the density of the text renders me pretty incapable of enjoying Spenser’s usage of the English language. Spenser is clearly a master of the poetic form, but I’m finding it difficult to dig at all into these pleasantries. Having said this, part of my difficulties stem from my inexperience in reading epic poems from this time period. Indeed, I often need to spend a great deal of time to figure out what is going on in the plot of our average class sonnet – with poetry of this length and of this density, establishing and maintaining the narrative arc of the story is, for me, a success in and of itself. Tl;dr I’m finding The Faerie Queene hard to read as an English student because I’m having a hard enough time trying to maintain an understanding of the plot. I feel like any literary analysis I attempt to offer on this epic is bound to fall short. I wish I could offer you some help, but I’m struggling to find an entry point myself.

Hi Raisa,

Thanks for bringing that question up – I’m having a lot of difficulty with The Faerie Queene as well. I’m still working on finding a specific part that I want to respond to, but something really technical that helped me was reading parts of it out loud. Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone (and it certainly is too much to read everything out loud), but reading the more dense stanzas out loud personally helped me in a lot of ways. First, it forced me to slow down, which heightened my awareness of Spenser’s many references and imagery. Second – perhaps because that culture was still very rooted in oral tradition? – it somehow helped me to make better sense of the language/text.

I don’t know if this will help, but good luck!

Hi Raisa,

I definitely agree that this is a tough text to get your teeth into. Most of the time, it feels as though Spenser is either teaching an open-and-shut moral lesson or describing something in such a way that I have no idea what’s going on. I personally responded to the parallels in imagery between Una and the Virgin Mary, and how that relates to Elizabeth in terms of our discussion of portraiture, but something else that struck me was the idea of “invention” that we discussed last week. Spenser references Chaucer and Ovid fairly frequently in his style and subject matter in The Faerie Queene, so his use of that technique and how it relates to poetic authenticity at the time might be a cool thing to examine.

Hope everyone’s enjoying the snow day!

Is anyone else finding that writing a response is very difficult? How did you guys find an entry point for the text?